Research Update

Last June, when we incorporated and started working on Philanthropedia full time, we had just 1 cause and 8 recommended nonprofits from a pool of 39 experts. By the end of this summer, we will have 13 causes, more than 150 top recommended nonprofits, more than 1,200 experts with an average of around 16 years of experience for the entire pool, and information on the full list of more than 1,500 total expert recommended nonprofits.

Here is some more information about our progress-to-date.

Local Research

We have completed all of our work on the Bay Area causes we ran. Now, we have information about high-impact nonprofits in 5 areas:

Bay Area homelessness (already on our site)

Bay Area climate change (already on our site)

Bay Area arts & culture

Bay Area early childhood education

Bay Area middle-secondary education

We have already published the results of these first two areas and by the end of this summer will publish the results of the last 3 areas, highlighting more than 40 additional outstanding nonprofits working in the Bay Area.

National Research

At the national level, we have been working on 5 more areas, as well to add to the causes we already have. Most of these new causes are still underway:

National climate change (already on our site)

National microfinance (already on our site)

National education (we are refreshing/re-running this research)

National reproductive health, rights, & justice

National arts & culture

National workforce development

National childhood nutrition

Because of this research, by the end of summer we will likely add around 80 more top-nonprofits to the website.

We also have a special, custom fund for Haiti disaster relief which brings our causes total to 13.

At the same time, we are in the process of reworking our website so it’s easier to navigate and can handle the additional content and data we want to provide donors with. Therefore, we plan to wait to release these results until we can roll out the new site. This should be around the beginning of September.

In addition to sharing information about the top nonprofits and the expert comments about impact, strengths, and areas for improvement, we will also be sharing the entire list of all nonprofits recommended by our experts. Now you will have access to our entire data set of nonprofits. In most cases, this is 100+ nonprofits per cause. While we cannot say for certain these are the highest-impact organizations, we still wanted to share the expert reviews of all organizations we’ve collected. We believe this longer list represents the diversity of each cause and the fractured nature of the nonprofit sector. There are a lot of outstanding organizations out there and we want to be sure that donors have access to all the expert recommendations we have collected over the last 12 months. This means we’ll have content and information on more than 1,500 nonprofits by the end of the summer for donors to review.

We hope you will stay tuned to see the results of the research and offer your thoughts and feedback.
Thank you!